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Scholarship and its Affiliations

Wendy Steiner on the Blunt case

In Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution, Anthony Blunt instructs Her Majesty the Queen about pictures. ‘Because something is not what it is said to be, Ma’am, does not mean it is a fake.’ ‘What is it?’ she asks. Sir Anthony gingerly suggests: ‘An enigma?’ Here as in Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood, the figure of the spy illustrates the irreducibility of human and aesthetic mystery, the contradictions that all personalities enshrine, the confusion that no amount of pedantic energy can resolve.

In the Twenties, as a schoolboy at Marlborough, Blunt embodied the aesthetics of Pure Form. At Cambridge in the Thirties, he signed on as a Soviet spy, one of the ‘Homintern’ that included Guy Burgess. During the Forties he doubled as an MI5 agent and a Soviet mole, became Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, and directed the Courtauld Institute. Awarded a KCVO in 1956, betrayed in 1963 but granted immunity, he was publicly exposed in 1979, during which year the Queen revoked his knighthood and he voted for Margaret Thatcher. Blunt is the enigmatist’s enigma.

The English imagination has responded strongly to this compounding of spycraft, scholarship, homosexual intrigue and royal scandal. Blunt’s 1979 exposure and his death in 1983 occasioned books, plays and films; and he figures in virtually every item in the seemingly endless literature on British espionage. Bluntiana have already outstripped Blunt’s own prodigious oeuvre. But one constituency has remained more or less silent about Blunt: the academy. George Steiner’s searching New Yorker essay in 1980 provoked no particular response from art historians and theorists. The British Academy debated Blunt’s expulsion after his exposure, but despite rancorous arguments and the dramatic resignation of A.J.P. Taylor, their proceedings did not lead to publications, conferences, lectures, or any of the other manifestations of a scholarly cause célèbre.

One has only to compare the recent furore over Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man to see how slight the impact of the Blunt affair has been on the academic community. Mutatis mutandis, all three men had disreputable if not dishonourable commerce with totalitarian regimes, all three produced widely influential and respected scholarship, and all three kept secret or at least unacknowledged their political pasts. Victor Farias’s recent claim that Heidegger may have supported the Nazis for more than the few months of his university rectorship and Ortwin de Graef’s discovery of de Man’s youthful contributions to the collaborationist paper Le Soir have thrown the European and American academies into confusion. Opponents of deconstruction may now appeal to historical fact to establish that the approach entails a deliberate splitting of art from political events: an ‘irrationalist fatalism’, as Frank Lentricchia would have it; or, for Terry Eagleton, a covert polemic against Marxism. And scholars whose entire orientation proceeds from Heidegger’s or de Man’s writing are forced to explain how a person can be both theoretically compelling and politically unacceptable.

In both cases the assumption is the same: there must be some connection between the theories of Heidegger or de Man and their political activities. Post-Modernists, deconstructionists and Marxists alike believe in the ‘ideological subtext’, convinced, like Fredric Jameson, that ‘there is nothing that is not social and historical ... [and] “in the last analysis” political.’ Having rejected the positivist claim that scholarship can be independent of ideology, we read everything ad hominem. Moreover, we fear contagion. Have we inadvertently ingested fascist poison with our deconstructive milk?

It is the connection between ideology and scholarship that is on trial in the current academic debates: this and the belief in the consistency of identity, the self as a seamless web. Already the richly humanistic efforts of Geoffrey Hartman, Pierre Bourdieu and Christopher Norris are rescuing the work of Heidegger and de Man without endangering the principle that ideology and text are invariably (if complexly) related. But what do we do with Anthony Blunt? Here was no mere polemicist but an agent of an enemy power whose commitment lasted not for a few months but for his entire adult life. Here was a man whose influence over scholars, students and art professionals was both profound and frighteningly discrete – so discrete, in fact, that a good part of the art-historical establishment of England is content to brush him aside as a distinguished pedant with an amusingly kinky set of secrets. Yet Blunt represents the limit case for academic freedom: the respectable scholar with illegal affiliations.

The full text of this essay is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.

Letters

Wendy Steiner’s article on the ‘Blunt case’ in your 30 March issue, bringing up the fact that no art historian has written on the subject so far, prompts me to signal that my book, which has just come out, The Interpretation of Pictures, contains a long section on this subject. No art historian familiar with Blunt and his work with whom I have discussed the subject has ever expressed agreement with George Steiner’s argument, as Ms Steiner seems to do, and omission from her account of Blunt’s attachment to the Warburg Institute and of his relations with Johannes Wilde produces a view of Blunt’s ‘scholarly corpus’ and the principles underlying it which makes for a strong disagreement between what she writes and the way in which I put together the different aspects of Blunt’s persona. Essentially, the history of art history is at issue here in important ways linking those within the discipline to those outside of it.

Mark Roskill
Department of Art History,

Your contributor, Wendy Steiner, is two Directors out. It was not Anthony Blunt, the third Director of the Courtauld Institute, but W.G. Constable, the first, who was one of those instrumental in bringing the Warburg Institute to London in 1933. For the record, and in gratitude, Constable’s colleagues in the rescue were C.S. Gibson and Sir E. Denison Ross, together with the committee they got together in Britain and – of course – the Warburg family.